Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless by Dan Albert

Abstract

Book Reviews Dan Albert. Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless. New York: Norton, 2019. Pp. 304. Notes. Illustrations. Index. Hardcover: $27.95 Dan Albert calls himself a “car guy,” and his lively and opinionated history of Americans and their cars aims at a broad audience, but it is far from a typical celebration of the joys of automobility. Although he follows the story from start to finish and visits some of the usual suspects, he takes detours along the way. He begins with familiar tales of Dearborn, Flint, and Detroit: the remarkable yet repellent Henry Ford, of course, and the rise of Billy Durant’s and Alfred P. Sloan’s General Motors. From there, though, he sometimes wanders off the beaten path, or at least enters it from an unfamilar side road, as he proceeds through chapters on, among other things, the interstate highway system as a last hurrah of big government (not, that is, of rugged individualism); fantasies of the flying car; the 1970s energy crisis and the pathetic models that Detroit responded with; CB-radio-wielding truckers; and his own adventures with engine repair. GM makes a recurring appearance as a notable villain, from its rejection of safety glass and promotion of leaded gasoline in the 1920s, through its postwar contempt for automotive safety and its skullduggery directed against Ralph Nader, to the mismanagement and disdain for the people of Flint decried by Michael Moore. General readers might appreciate Albert’s penchant for outrageous humor (“the average age of a Cadillac buyer is dead” [225]) and his refusal to rely on the theories of “Siggy and Karl”—that is, Freud and Marx. Scholars may find his references, facts, and figures a little (but only a little) inadequate. He dismisses Peter Norton’s arguments about the auto industry’s heavy hand in the reconstruction of city streets, apparently without fully understanding them. Still, even as his jaunty prose and vivid tales glide along, he has serious points to make, including some that specialists might find illuminating. For all the book’s idiosyncracies, Albert’s pointed observations give it an arc. He opens with the distinctly non-technological reasons early electric cars lost out to the Model T and concludes with a warning about the dangers of letting the technology of self-driving cars dictate our future. He recognizes that the car was always two things: “a transportation machine and a consumer product to be desired, owned and enjoyed as a driver.” (72) It—in its gasoline-powered variety—conquered America not merely because it was useful but because it channeled masculine aggression (it’s too bad he does not cite Gijs Mom’s more systematic case 168 The Michigan Historical Review for this claim). Albert the car guy laments the transformation of his sporty ride into an “automotive womb” sheltering its occupants, while Albert the sharp-eyed critic also sees a more pernicious error in this triumph of automotive safety, since air bags and the like have done “nothing to protect vulnerable road users such as cyclists and pedestrians.” (174) This historically grounded dual perspective informs his skeptical take on selfdriving cars. These joyless parlors on wheels are the ultimate triumph of traffic engineering, the logic of which “obscures an ideology”: it “trades safety for mobility.” (269) In other words, designs for city streets have long assumed that the highest priority is automotive speed, benefitting only the denizens of those well-padded interiors. Cities for people, not just for cars, cannot be places where roads are reserved for the use of speeding robots. Albert proclaims the imminent end of the automotive age. As the thrill of driving no longer engages the young, and as we read about drivers who doze off while their Teslas cruise at highway speed, historians might take note. Brian Ladd University at Albany Danielle Aubert. The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing. Los Angeles, CA: Inventory Press, 2019. Pp. 240. Illustrations. Paper: $29.95 Detroit has a fascinating history of radical politics regarding both the Right—as headquarters of the National Socialist Movement—and the Left—as the founding site of the United Automobile Workers...